Hi All! Notes from tonight's meeting. Apologies for poor grammar and spelling mistakes. I type faster then my brain can keep up. :o)
Q&A's FileMaker Pro:- How do you transfer a file from Mac to Windows. You can email or transfer it across and it should work. As long as it has .fp5 filename on the end then it should work fine with no problems. Andrew Schox then went through REALBasic and his crossword program he wrote in the same. REALBAsic is easy to get started with. Very good for prototyping and scaleable enough for professional use. It is also cross platform, and creates native applications on each platform. It is also royalty-free. It has a built in database, using SQL. You can also connect to other databases as well. So you can create a graphical interface to a "behind the scenes" database. You can prototype software very quickly and easy. Drag and Drop Interface. It has native support for User Interface controls. (Buttons, controls etc). When writing the source code, it has auto complete, so makes it a lot easier and faster to write it. It has integrated help built in as well. Also gives you little helpful tips as well. It has support for Vector graphics, real-time 3D engine, sprite animation engine. Modern and Object orientated language. Advanced language as well. It has good memory management, sockets for Internet Protocols.and regular expressions. (Used for searching for patterns). It has QuickTime support with all panning features, sound control and more. It has some good Windows features as well, such as no DLL's, Active-X. You can call through to the underlying routines as well for the "advanced stuff". It has native look and feel for Apple, uses System services, scripts etc. Royalty free so you can write your award winning application and no have to pay anything for it. It has international language support so you can write things in your own language. Also supports unicode. It has support for Microsoft Office. It's extensible. It has a very strong user community, via mailing lists, as well as the developers etc. You can also get REALBasic developer magazine as well. It is very scriptable, scalable and can use console applications. You can download REALBasic and have a play with it yourself. You can download it from <http://www.realsoftware.com>. Andrew then demo'ed the Crossword helper application that he wrote. It took about 15 minutes for him to write. It's basically a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the terminal commends. It goes through and does all the work behind the scenes, but makes it easy for people to use. We then had a look at REALBasic itself. It uses project windows, code windows, properties, buttons/boxes/list window. By using it, it allows you start small and work on it from there making it very scaleable. Once you knowledge grows, so does your application! :o) All very interesting and fun! And not too expensive to get started with, even for the professional version. (In comparison to other products on the market very well priced as well.) Matt then demo'ed Firefox. Another browser alternative. By the old Netscape crowd. Firefox for web browsing and Thunderbird for email. They wrote the web browser, made it Mac like, and works very well. Sometimes even better then Internet Explorer or Safari. It has all the usual features, tab browsing, google bar, normal preferences, bookmarks etc. That's where it stops being like Safari. You can change the look of it and even use the "get more themes" and change the look of it. You can add little more plugins (Extensions). It downloads features so you can do more from the browser itself. You name it, you can add it. For example, control your favourite media player from within the browser without leaving it! Plus lots more. It has all the normal preferences and more. You have a bit more privacy control then what you can do with Safari. It works well with cookies, more then Safari does. You can also specify exceptions to cookies as well. It has a better pop up blocker then Safari does. You can also stop it from loading images as well, so it will only load text and leave the rest. Good for a slower connection. It has a fairly large advanced preference setting as well. Overall a very good web browser, fast, works well with a lot of web sites (even ones that won't open on other browsers or pages that don't open properly on other browsers). Well worth a look! You can download it from:- <http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19029> Daniel then showed off a few Mac OSX hints for this month:- Application Switcher. To access this hold down the Apple and hit Tab key. Each time you use tab it will move through the open applications. From here you can then use Apple-H to hide an application, Apple-Q to quit and open application and Apple-~ (tilde key) to go backwards through applications. Quite handy when you want to jump from one app to another without using the mouse. If you've got a folder window open, but not sure where it is on the hard drive, you can hold down the Apple key and click on the little icon in the top most window (beside the folder name) and a drop down menu will show you the hierarchal list of folders. And the last tip. If you ever want to take a screen shot there are a few ones to do it. Apple-Shift-3 : This will take a whole snapshot of everything on the screen. You'll end up with a "picture 1" pdf on the desktop. Apple-Shift-4 : This will give you a crosshair cursor which you drag around the contents you want to take a picture of. This will just take a selection snapshot. Again you'll get a "picture x" pdf on the desktop (With x being a number). Apple-Shift-4 then hitting space bar : Will take a snapshot of the whole window that it blues out. Again a pdf is created. And with any of the above if you hold down the Control key before doing it you'll get the information copied to the clipboard so you can paste it to any other program! How handy is that! ;o) The meeting closed with a couple of QuickTime movies trailers and tea and coffee. I hope everyone enjoyed the meeting. Thanks again to everyone coming along. See you next month! Enjoy! Kind Regards Daniel Kerr
